Kindaconundrum continued

Shortly after my previous blog post, I decided to send an abbreviated version of the question I raised in that blog to the Foundation for A Course In Miracles. Here’s the question that I submitted, followed by the answer that they provided:

Question:  Please can you advise whether Kenneth has ever commented on the matter of life-between lives, and specifically on the work of people like Michael Newton? Briefly, I would have thought that there is greater spiritual clarity in the non-bodily state, in which case the councils of elders (etc), as described in many of the LBL reports, should surely be more aware that incarnation into bodies does not truly result in evolution of the soul. Yet they seem to effectively be encouraging ‘less-advanced’ souls to perpetuate the almost endless cycle of life-and-death.

Reply:  Kenneth has not spoken in depth on [this matter]…. He has many times, though, spoken about the Course’s views on death and what happens after the body dies. This past March, in fact, he gave a 5-day class on the topic, which will be published in audio, video and book form shortly.

 

The key principle in the Course’s view is that the death of the body has no effect on the mind: in itself it changes nothing in terms of the spiritual journey of the mind. The decision to identify with the ego or the Holy Spirit is the source of all change. Life-between-lives could be thought of, thus, as symbolic of the decision-making capacity of the mind. In the Course’s theory, the body is never the problem because it is simply the projection of the mind seeking to escape from the pain of believing that it has rejected God and that God will inflict eternal punishment for that “sin”. The body’s life and death reflect the mind’s continued choice to believe this, so nothing really happens in the mind when the body dies. If the mind is still steeped in sin and guilt, it will go on projecting that in form in some way. In that sense, there is no greater spiritual clarity after the body dies. The body is in the mind, not the other way around, according to the Course.

So, from this it would appear that my assumption about souls always experiencing greater spiritual clarity when they’re out of the body is not necessarily true.  On the contrary, if we understand that both the physical and ethereal states, in their entirety, are projections of the split mind, it follows that souls who are out of the body, whether in the LBL or post-incarnation states, may be just as deluded about their roles and purpose as those who are still incarnate, and that what ‘happens’ in the ethereal realms may be as full of error as anything that ‘happens’ in the physical. This may sound like a simple and obvious observation, but I think it’s quite important, because the ‘conventional wisdom’ in regard to spirituality appears to be that the out-of-body state is not only free from pain and conflict, but also more ‘conscious’ than the physical state. The vast majority of people with a modern spiritual perspective believe this.

I'm still not clear about why Pursah says that enlightenment only happens in the body, but will hopefully be in a position to follow up on that specific issue shortly.

Kindaconundrum

On page 263-4 of Disappearance of the Universe, Pursah makes the following comments, which apply to both near-death experiences and the between-lives state:

“People either hear or find out for themselves how beautiful the near-death experience can be, but they don’t understand that it’s temporarily beautiful only in comparison to life in the body. When you are free of all the body’s pain and restrictions and become temporarily aware of the larger split mind, it can be awe-inspiring. But people can’t tell you the whole experience, because if they could, they would have had the whole experience, and they’d be dead! Of course it’s their body that would appear to be dead and they’d be moving on to the next illusory lifetime.

What happens is that the awe eventually wears off because the unconscious guilt that is still within the mind starts to catch up with you. This causes you to reincarnate as a way of escaping your guilt and your fear of God. This always happens to you eventually, unless your mind has been completely healed by the Holy Spirit.

….what we want to stress is that you shouldn’t confuse the very transitory joy of reported near-death experiences with enlightenment. Enlightenment happens during one of your illusory lifetimes.

….you’re not going to find enlightenment somewhere on the other side afterwards. In other words, you have to forgive and make your progress now.”

I have heard and read a lot on the subject of NDEs and am presently reading the book Memories of the Afterlife (edited by Michael Newton, PhD), which comprises a series of fascinating life-between-lives case studies. The majority of NDEs do indeed appear to have a positive transformative effect on the experiencers (see The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences, by PMH Atwater). And, similarly, the between-lives state, as reported in Memories of the Afterlife, appears to be a place of ‘loveliness and light’, devoid of conflict and strife, where souls, all happily united in purpose (though remaining conspicuously separate from one another) sit around planning how their next bodily experiences should play out – all, apparently, with the expectation that these experiences will lead us ever upward in the advancement of our souls

Almost everything we hear about the between-life state, NDEs, and other out-of-body experiences suggests that the ‘veils of spiritual darkness’ are lifted in those situations. As mentioned, most reports describe experiences of profound beauty and love, and, in particular, an awareness of the seamless interconnectedness of all things. But what I find confusing is that despite being in a place of supposedly far greater spiritual clarity than we experience while in the bodily state, souls engaged in past-life reviewing and next-life planning apparently see nothing illusory about the idea of the evolution of soul. On the contrary, they take the business of manifold reincarnations very seriously. I’ve never read anything to suggest that souls in the discarnate state become aware that they’re really just perpetuating a game of separation under the illusion that it will lead them eventually to nirvana, as A Course in Miracles teaches. Surely we should be more aware of that and more able to 'wake up' when we’re not ‘blinded’ by the limitations of fleshly form.

Again, the common assumption among spiritually-inclined people is that we are most spiritually ‘blind’ while in the bodily state and more spiritually awake when we escape the confines of the flesh. In this view, the bodily experience is considered important as a means of accelerating our soul-growth, but we need to go back regularly into the non-bodily state in order to see where we’re ‘at’, as it were. In contrast, the Course seems to argue that we sink more deeply into the illusion when we’re in the non-bodily state, and that we can finally begin to see what’s really going on when we are in the body, with all its attendant traumas and conflicts. As Kenneth Wapnick explains, in his lecture on The Ego and Forgiveness, “the Holy Spirit takes the most cherished and powerful part of the ego system, which is projection, and that’s the very device that he uses to reverse what the ego has done”. In other words, the ‘body game’ (the product of projection) is the ego’s biggest mistake, because it provides the ideal opportunity for the Holy Spirit to reveal what’s actually going on. This seems to tie in well with Pursah’s comments, quoted above.

OK, so I understand the idea that the body is really the key to escaping from the ego-illusion. It's an idea that resonates strongly with me, because I’m a big fan of the ACIM’s thought system. But then how do I make sense of all the advanced souls, guides, ascended masters and the like who populate the between-lives realm? As I understand it, they’ve progressed beyond bodily incarnations, which implies that the bodily state is less spiritually-evolved. And yet many post-incarnation souls seem to be in the business of encouraging other ‘less advanced’ souls to perpetuate the interminable cycle of life-and-death, supposedly for the purpose of ‘soul growth’. According to the Course, at least as I understand it, there is no need for such soul growth because we are already spiritually-complete. Surely an ‘advanced’ soul would understand this better than anyone? Or are such souls just more deluded than anyone else? And if they’ve given up on incarnating into bodies and thus no longer experience the opportunities for awakening that the body offers, then how will they ever escape from their delusions?

Of course, this line of thinking breaks down when we consider that Arten and Pursah also identify themselves as ascended masters. They don't seem to be confused about what the Course teaches. So are some ascended masters perhaps not quite as ascended as they'd like to think they are? What defines an ascended master anyway?

Well, I’m not sure how to make sense of all of this, but I must confess I enjoy it – building the jigsaw puzzle bit-by-bit, as the pieces appear, and without knowing what the whole picture looks like. What does seem clear, as I've tried to argue here, is that some of the common assumptions about the ‘spiritually-superior’ nature of NDEs, between-lives states and supposedly advanced souls do not add up – at least not in terms of what ACIM teaches. So what else do I need to know in order to get the equation to compute?